News + Events

Most game theory models don’t reflect the relentlessly random timing of the real world. In a new paper, Justin Grana, James Bono, and SFI Professor David Wolpert model what happens when players receive information or act at random times, which could make a big difference in decision-making.

SFI Science Board member Derek Smith has worked in academia, industry, and public health. He is using insights from his work at SFI to develop an evolution-inspired flu vaccine.

SFI External Professor Raissa D’Souza (UC Davis) has joined the journal Physical Review Research as Lead Editor.

External Professor Stephanie Forrest and co-authors received the 2019 Ten-Year Most Influential Paper award from the International Conference on Software Engineering for their 2009 paper "Automatically Finding Patches Using Genetic Programming."

Tuesday, July 9, computer scientist Sabine Hauert discussed how individual actions give rise to swarm behaviors, and the challenges researchers face when engineering swarms for desired applications.

Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier, events occurring with higher-than-expected probability. Using the same mathematical tools that describe stock market crashes, SFI researchers explain the evolutionary dynamics behind this universal pattern in the fossil record and uncover "a new normal."

In their essay for Aeon, External Professor Sara Walker and Professor Michael Lachmann argue that we would do well to understand life as a process of transmitting information.

In his new book Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity, SFI External Professor Andreas Wagner compares the tools of biological evolution with those of human innovation to make sense of the creative process that is happening in our minds all the time.

To start addressing pressing questions raised by the proliferation of new crypto networks, SFI hosts a workshop on “Collective Crypto” June 13.

A June working group meets to learn more about how public opinion changes, and how quickly.

A special themed issue of the journal Entropy gathers together "new developments and original applications of generalized statistical mechanics to complex systems of various natures.”

Borne out of a transdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute working group, Law as Data, edited by Michael Livermore and Dan Rockmore, explores the new field of computational legal analysis — the study of the law that uses legal texts as data.

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate who revealed symmetry and order in the world of subatomic particles and leveled his genius at complex mysteries of life and mind, died peacefully May 24, 2019. He was 89 years old.

The second annual InterPlanetary Festival lands June 14-16, 2019 in Santa Fe’s Railyard Park.

A May working group brings critics of urban scaling theory to engage in respectful dialogue with SFI scientists in the Social Reactors project.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019 physicist Jean Carlson discussed the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time.

A new analysis of academic productivity finds researchers' current working environments better predict their future success than the prestige of their doctoral training.

While time and age in standard dynamical systems are treated as simple clocks that run at a constant rate, the human experience of age is measured by consequences. In this talk on Tuesday, May 21 at 7:30 p.m., physicist Jean Carlson will illustrate the interplay between biological aging, adaptation, and the arrow of time through examples taken from her research and focus areas of a five-year Santa Fe Institute research theme.

The 2019 InterPlanetary Festival takes place June 14-16 in Santa Fe, NM. 

Modular — or cliquey — group structure isolates the flow of communication between individuals, which might seem counterproductive to survival. But for some animal groups, more information isn't necessarily better, according to new SFI research published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.